Was it a smart career move to kick Jonah Goldberg in the knee? No, of course not, but there are a lot of things I’ve done over the years that could be characterized as the diametric opposite of “smart career moves.” I’ve always preferred the Eric Stratton Philosophy of Life:

Boon: I gotta work on my game.Otter: No, no, no! Don’t think of it as work. The whole point is just to enjoy yourself.

Some readers misunderstood my purpose in subjecting Jonah Goldberg to the kind of blunt sarcasm I habitually aim at liberals. Do I want a fight with Jonah? Oh, hell, no — he’s the size of a linebacker, and I’m not enough of a journalistic celebrity to rely on the “David Gregory Loophole” in D.C.’s strict gun-control policy. So I’ll be unarmed and defenseless when I show up at the National Review Summit this afternoon.

Although I understand they’ve hired heavy security at the Omni Shoreham to deal with any troublemakers, what’s to stop Jonah Goldberg from slipping the guards $100 to look the other way while he pounds my head up against a brick wall?

No, I don’t want to go mano a mano with that savage giant. My point in depicting the NRI Summit as a conclave of effete snobs was to incite grassroots resentment, to inspire a populist mob to pay their $250 and show up at the Omni Shoreham howling for blood: Stir up some kind of controversy — “fireworks” as the headline-writers say — that will provide an approximation of actual news for me to report.

Readers who contribute to the Shoe Leather Fund aren’t paying me to go down to D.C. so I can write up the tedious proceedings of a series of panel discussions. No, the tip-jar hitters want some real news: At least a couple of angry shouting matches, if not indeed a brutal mob beatdown on Joe Scarborough. It was a smart idea to invite America’s Least Popular “Republican” TV Personality™ to this event, if only on the basis on the venerable principle that there is no such thing as bad publicity, except your own obituary. Speaking of obituaries . . .

When I told a certain investigative journalist friend of mine I was coming to town for the NRI Summit, he said, “You mean the one with the panel on ‘what’s wrong with the Right,’ where the answer to the question is, ‘The people on stage’?”

Panel: What is Wrong with the Right? Moderator: Reihan Salam, National Review Online Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard Yuval Levin, National Affairs John Podhoretz, Commentary Magazine Joe Scarborough, MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ Ross Douthat, New York Times

Notice — and I hate to be the one to point this out — that there isn’t a single female or Latino on that panel? So there’s one answer to your question: “Intellectuals who are clueless about optics.” This is not to endorse a tokenistic system of affirmative action among the rightward intelligentsia, but when you exclude key demographics and the closest thing to a “youth” presence you can offer is 33-year-old Harvard classmates Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat . . .

Finish that sentence however you want.

If the proprietors of Conservatism, Inc., want to run their operation as an Old Boys Club for Ivy Leaguers, who am I to object? It’s a free country. My advice was never solicited, and it’s unlikely the heirs of the Buckley Legacy would listen if I offered unsolicited advice. So I kick ’em in the knee, give ’em free publicity, and hope maybe some of our readers will pay $250 for the right to ask a few pointed questions.

And, honestly, it won’t be a totally lame snobfest. A few of the participants in this weekend’s NRI Summit proceedings:

Maybe you think all of those people are part of the problem, and you can pay $250 to get in their face and tell ’em so. But surely any conservative could look at that list and see at least a few names that might be part of the solution, and you can pay $250 to show up and cheer them.

The point is that I’m not anti-NRI Summit. I am anti-boredom, however, and even if the angry dissent and controversy — “fireworks”! — are as dramatically phony as professional wrestling, we need some infighting and bloodletting and perhaps even random violence among the panelists, if only to justify my spending a weekend in D.C.

WASHINGTON, D.C.
Conservative journalist John Podoretz is “expected to recover” from the critical injuries he suffered during a savage fistfight that broke out Saturday afternoon during a panel discussion on immigration policy at the National Review Institute Summit.
Podhoretz was “conscious and responsive,” said a spokesman at George Washington University Hospital, where the Commentary magazine editor was rushed by paramedics after he charged the stage during a presentation by Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“It was totally unexpected,” said Krikorian, who was questioned and released by Metropolitan Police. “All I did was defend myself.”
Stunned witnesses said Podhoretz seemed to become agitated when Krikorian made several sarcastic references to the “open borders lobby” and “gutless neocons” whom he blamed for recent political setbacks suffered by the Republican Party.
“John started trembling and then his face became contorted by rage,” said Jim Geraghty, a National Review staffer who was moderating the panel. Geraghty said that Podhoretz shouted “anti-Armenian slurs” before charging across the ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel and attempting to attack Krikorian, who responded by slamming Podhoretz into the floor. . . .

Could that really happen? We certainly can’t rule it out. Bad blood between Krikorian and the “gutless neocons” has been brewing for years. Everybody knows who he’s talking about. Podhoretz’s irrational Fear and Loathing of Armenians isn’t exactly a secret, either.

That’s why readers want to contribute to the Shoe Leather Fund and send me down to D.C. for the weekend: If there’s going to be trouble — and it’s at least an outside possibility these vicious internecine rivalries might lead to an all-out riot at the National Review Institute Summit — you’re gonna want me to provide an on-the-scene report of this epic battle. Because I’m strictly a Neutral Objective Journalist.

Comments

As for Podhoretz, following an email exchange some years back I concluded he had either missed his meds or swallowed too many. He came across as hyper-sensitive to criticism but completely unaware of sarcasm.

The fact that Joe Scarborough is a participant and Thomas Sowell is not, makes this event completely illegitimate regarding the “Future of Conservatism”, but I’m sure there will be plenty of sarcasm to go around at the #unsustainablebartab. 🙂

A 3-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed the Obama administration a major defeat today, ruling that President Obama’s appointment of three members to the National Labor Relations Board last year violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, which says that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law.”

If this is upheld by higher courts, this means that every decision the NLRB made in 2012 will be vacated for lack of a quorum, which is a Good Thing since the NLRB has been the labor unions’ best buddy under the Obama Administration. Even if they just rule the same way they did before, that’s time wasted that they can’t use to screw up anything else.

I understand that the serious nature of this important piece of journalism has caused you to limit your appeals to readers to support this smart, philosophy forum.

So I urge on Stacy’s behalf, that everyone please ignore his modesty in seeking our support, and contribute generously to the coverage of this impending, gravitational collapse of conservative cerebration.

Someone has to smack the complacency off of their faces. Someone must utilize the lost art of gonzo-fu, and reach into their psyche’s thoracic region, and rip out their still-beating impulse-to-moderation and shove it in their faces. Stacy is just the man to do it.

I read about that at Legal Insurrection. I was confused over the commentary though. Unless I misread it, or there’s a typo somewhere, it appears to indicate that John Bolton’s recess appointment was unconstitutional, too.

As a friend of mine reported once after a brutal job interview (trying to escape working at the programmer’s hellhole at which we both spent many years), his interviewer said something like:

“Mr. Jones, your resume indicates you have seven years experience in computing. But your job history would seem to indicate spending all of it with an employer not known for giving it’s programmers broad exposure to the field. I’m afraid that is more indicative of one year of experience, seven times over.”

You know what Stacy, I hate to bring it up here. I would have been there ready to ask some questions, if you had just answered my repeated emails. Apparently they went into the void. You are not alone. One of my pet peeves. If you want to get support, you must be approachable.

[…] smoking area, on the way encountering National Review reporter Rob Costa, who’s prepared for the riot I’ve been trying to incite at this weekend’s summit. Costa’s not a smoker, so we bid him adieu and headed out to the front of the hotel where the […]

Was a loon during my exchange with him, which is why I suspected the involvement of drugs–either illicit or the lack of needed prescription drugs. I mean what I say–no jokes.

Since then I’ve passed by his columns for the same reason I always passed by those of the wife of Ohio’s former governor, Richard Celeste.

Jaynie59 January 26th, 2013 @ 9:06 am

Everytime he mentions his place in New Hampshire I feel bad for him. I lived in New Hampshire in the 1980’s and boy oh boy was it awful. Scraping frost off the windshield from September to May. I don’t miss that. Dead batteries in the dead of winter and a two hour wait for AAA. I don’t miss that. One May we got 2 feet of snow and after spending an hour trying to clean off my Datsun 210 I gave up and walked to work.
And I lived south of where he does! I lived in West Lebanon, NH and worked in White River Junction VT.
It’s funny. My journey from liberal to conservative has been a really long road, but now that I think about it, I decided to live in New Hampshire instead of Vermont even though my job was in Vermont for only one reason. I liked the license plate.

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